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Promoting action for sustainability through indicators at the local level in europe

Objective

Problems to be solved
Sustainability indicators have been widely adopted as a key policy tool for moving towards sustainable development but their widespread adoption is not without problems. The key emerging problem is: How can sustainability indicators be used to 'make a difference' to decision-making? The project addresses this key problem by focusing on the use of local sustainability indicators at the urban level to assist decision making to achieve sustainable city planning and resource management. This is one of the fastest growing areas of indicator use and it is also one which raises most directly the problem of relating indicator development and design to changing decision-making and behaviour. The involvement of local communities - broadly defined to include business and citizen groups - is often an integral element of devising sustainability indicators. How this relates to the efficacy of indicators as a policy tool is a key issue of urban governance, as well environmental governance. The integration of local sustainability indicators as decision making tools into the hierarchy of national and supranational indicators and strategies will also be addressed, relating as it does to the application of the subsidiarity principle.
Scientific objectives and approach
The overall objective of the project is to analyse the implementation of local sustainability indicators programmes, in a variety of contexts, and to develop models, methods and techniques to ensure that these indicators impact on decision making at the municipality level. In addition, the project has four more detailed objectives. First, it will define the range of roles that local sustainability indicators can play and the variation in processes of indicator development. Second, it will examine the processes of indicator development and use in the partner cities and relate this to the contextual factors operating in each case. Third, it will identify the role of local sustainability indicators in examples of public policy decision-making and development within each partner city, and assess their impact and effectiveness. Fourth, it will disseminate research results in order to facilitate more effective urban governance and more relevant strategic European policies in the context of subsidiarity. The research will be undertaken by a consortium drawn from four countries: UK, France, Austria and Switzerland. In each country there will be a local research partnership comprising a municipality and a research competence (sometimes a joint competence). The localities involved are: London (specifically, the London Borough of Southwark), Le Grand Lyon, Vienna and Winterthur. These partnerships will adopt a common methodological basis to investigate the local sustainability indicators programmes in each municipality; each municipality has been chosen on the basis of an existing active involvement with sustainability indicators. The local partnerships will analyse the factors influencing the impact of such indicators on decision-making in the context of a specific local case study within each municipality, again according to a common analytic framework. This approach will allow for: local diversity in the sustainability indicators programmes; the variety of functions that local sustainability indicators play; and the specificities of the local socio-economic, environmental and political/administrative context. The recommendations regarding best practice that will arise from the research should, therefore, have a broad applicability across different local contexts.
Expected impacts
PASTILLE should lead to improved methods of urban governance by enhancing the effective of local sustainability indicators programmes. It is anticipated that the models, methods and techniques devised from the analysis of the research findings will enable both a practitioners' guide and citizens' briefing to be written and disseminated; these should have the potential to affect practice in diverse local municipalities across Europe in the medium term.
1.User requirements for reconfigurable devices
2.Development of validator for adaptive modulation in WCDMA downlink. By performance measurements and user assessment, it has been clearly shown, that adaptive modulation is a must for reconfigurable devices
3.Development and demonstration of analogue RF components on the receiver and transmitter side supporting various standards as GSM, UMTS, Hiperlan/2, etc. (up to 5 GHz frequency range)
4.Development of an adaptive baseband demonstrator supporting various standards
5.Development of a system architecture supporting reconfigurable devices
6.Novel work on security, which support the management of rogue terminals and improvements for the secure software download
7.Novel functions as cooperative mode monitoring have been proposed which illustrate that SDR is also a set of technologies and functions not yet addressed in public research work
8.>120 contributions to 3GPP,ITU-R WP 8F,SDR-Forum,WWRF,conferences and journals

Fields of science

Programme(s)

Topic(s)

Call for proposal

Data not available

Funding Scheme

CSC - Cost-sharing contracts

Coordinator

LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE
Address
Houghton street
WC2A 2AE London
United Kingdom

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EU contribution
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Participants (9)

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Last update: 10 March 2023

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Permalink: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/EVK4-CT-1999-00004

European Union, 2023